


All the White Horses

by montparnasse



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-17
Updated: 2015-10-17
Packaged: 2018-04-26 21:10:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5020654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The only way to deal with love is to jump in head-first, and heart-first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All the White Horses

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MiraMira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiraMira/gifts).



> MiraMira, we matched on so many pairings I actually had a hard time choosing which one to write for you! I do hope this suits; congratulations on your incredible taste.

The greatest woman Isabela ever knew was a grey-haired Rivaini sailor who sat with her on the Llomerryn docks the night of her wedding when the moon was a red, red scythe above the water, hung jagged at the base of the horizon like a knife to a throat, bleeding the pinpricks of the stars from the sky. She watched the wedding procession and the human overflow into the streets afterwards while Isabela stuck her feet in the sea, watching her new white stockings darken with saltwater, and she told Isabela—entirely unbidden—that she’d been to every port city worth mentioning in Thedas, every autumn harbor and hazy summer-lit street; she told her that, in all her wandering, she’d found someone new every time her feet hit land again, a woman or sometimes a man, and that she’d loved them all sincerely, ravenously, for a day or a month or, once in a while, for whole years at a time.

And Isabela, her broken heart beating, looked out at the red blood-burst of the moon and asked her if she even knew what she meant, when she said that word.

 _Always_ , the sailor told her, _and someday—no, not now—but someday, darling one, you’ll know._

Between the nightbirds and the drone of the pub behind them, Isabela could hear her mother’s voice, joking, laughing, counting out the gold she was owed: pound for pound of Isabela’s whole body, her weight and her worth spelled out in gold bars and a few yards of silk—all told, it wasn’t even that much. She could feel the woman looking at her, and if Isabela could have turned away from the vast empty wilderness of the nighttime horizon, she might have spat in her face, or kissed her, or begged her to take her away from here, hide her under the bed or stuff her in a trunk, but she couldn’t, because she could hardly open her mouth at all; she couldn’t, because this woman, who had money and plans and the whole world tucked into her back pocket like a slim cotton-worn map, couldn’t possibly know what Isabela did: that Isabela, who was just a child, a fourteen-year-old child in a dirty wedding dress who had become ancient over the course of a single day at midsummer, knew better than to think the world cared what happened to her one way or another.

No, she thought, her head crowning the barren sky when she stood up. No, not me.

—

Sometimes Isabela wonders, with a sharp, secretive sort of thrill deep in her belly, when she became so beholden to Hawke that she hardly turns down an offer to take off on a fruitless trip up the Wounded Coast or slum it in Lowtown until the stars poke out names and shapes in the sky and they both fall asleep in a heap on the bed of her rented room, too drunk to stand. Probably, it was sometime after the first fuck and before the Snafu, the Great Mistake, the Error, the one she’s still trying to scrub from her mind every time she sees the scorch marks on the marble of a Hightown street, or when she feels Hawke’s eyes on her in the firelight, looking at her like she thinks Isabela can’t tell she’s looking at her; really, they’re one and the same by this point, as inextricable as the tangled mesh of fear and joy and guilt all rotting her from the inside-out. She laces up her boots when she sees her coming, Aveline and Anders in tow, and puts on her most convincing smile.

“Oh, _Hawke_ ,” she says, planting both feet on the ground with a hand on her hip, solid gold all the way from her elbow to her shoulder, heavy as plate armor over her heart. “And, y’know, you two. Come to rescue me from this den of iniquity? It’s a good thing I’m dressed, I mean, it’s not like I spent all last night waiting around in a lot of artfully-placed jewelry and all of _nothing_ , or anything.”

“Other way around,” Aveline answers, “and look alive—you’re working for me today, so I don’t want to see any _displays_ , artful bits or not.”

“Yes, _sir_ ,” she says, and gets herself a fond smack in the back of the head for it, and tries to hide the way it makes her smile.

Down to the docks, then, and into a warehouse, where they join a fight already in progress like the steady expanse of oxygen in a room. It’s over fast, and it’s bloody, and suddenly Isabela doesn’t know what to do with her hands or her mouth with Hawke standing there beside her and both of them entirely, alarmingly too sober to be anywhere near each other on a knife-bright autumn afternoon. They pick their way through the detritus of floorboards and overturned barrels until they’re back outside, staggering half-blind into the light, and Isabela, looking out to the sea with a vague memory of Hawke’s mouth on hers two nights ago, and considers the ancient question: _how do I escape myself?_ The problem now, though, is she doesn’t know how to do that anymore, except through Hawe.

“So. Done playing nursemaid for the day?” She wants to take off her boots and sink into the sand; she wants to be a hundred miles from here. “That’s, what, four hours you’ve kept me out of trouble? My bloody hero.”

“Someone get me a chocolate roll,” says Hawke. Out here, in the sun, her eyes are almost a hostile blue, cut from the same jagged cast as her bird-bones and her knifeblade profile in dark relief against the sky. “Listen, I know it’s—it’s been shit, right, with the cleanup, and the mess, and learning to Do The Right Thing, and what-all—”

“Oh, Maker—do we need to do this? Really?”

Hawke looks at her from across the invisible chasm between them, and Isabela wants—stupidly, _violently_ —to reach out to her, hold her, go to her like she used to when they were each other’s north and south, easier than any arithmetic. Instead, she digs her heels in and watches the gulls take flight over the sea, trying not to think of Hawke’s eyes, Hawke’s sad eyes and her kindness that is almost indifference, and how she wants nothing more than to take her back to her room and hold her and never let go, never let go. She presses her hand over the necklace hanging between her breasts, warm gold over heart, where no one can ever see. “There’s nothing to talk about, Hawke,” she finishes, and leans against the gritty stucco wall, and shivers in the salt air.

“There’s plenty to talk about,” says Hawke, biting down on it, a bit. “Like how you’re still here even though, by all rights, you _should_ be dead drunk in Antiva right now, or how you act like you’re afraid of me if you haven’t got at least four shots in you and it’s still daylight out, or how you _still_ ask me up to your room if you’re lit and you _still_ act like nothing’s happened—”

“Then maybe you need to find another screw, sweet thing,” she spits. “I’m not your bloody keeper, am I? For someone who’s supposed to be in love with me, you’re really not very good at it, you know.”

It must _burn_ , and she knows it: Hawke’s whole face falters as if she’s been slapped, shell-shocked, and Isabela turns to leave, her limbs glacier-slow, her heart thrumming in her teeth like a red, red ruin. There’s not another word between them, not until Hawke calls after her: “You’re a _coward_.”

But Isabela, because she knows so and because she’s heard so much worse, only keeps walking all the way back to The Hanged Man, where she drinks and cheats at poker and picks a fight with a mercenary in the alley, frustration and regret and shame crackling in all her limbs. The tide and the tired autumn tumble of stars drag Hawke in after midnight with the three-quarter moon, undressing by the mirror in the flicker-flare of the single stub of a candle on the nightstand, only incidentally catching Isabela’s eyes on hers in the reflection across the room, so that Isabela can’t see what expression she’s wearing, what new hurt she’s showing.

 _We’re ruinous together, you and me_ , she wants to say, thinking of all the times she’s tasted her own blood on her tongue, how many times they’ve fought, argued, parted, wished, wanted, rejoined, rejoiced. How many times they’ve come back to each other, again and again in perpetual, cyclical orbit, as different people; how they’ve had to learn the roughness and sweetness of togetherness, all over again.

Briefly, she wonders if this is what it means, to be in thrall. Or maybe it’s indigestion; introspection has a way of making that strange empty twinge behind the ribs sound so much more profound than it really is.

“I bet you think that makes you look _romantic_ ,” Hawke says, sulky-sultry, nodding to the dim mellow candle-flame making their shadows darken on the walls and the floorboards.

“Absolutely devastating,” she says. Hawke presses her back on the bed, onto the faded flannel blanket, and Isabela runs her palms up her thighs and tastes the shiver on her lips when Hawke bends down to kiss her, eyelashes only lowered instead of closed, so that the edge of one murky iris flashes in the dark. A slow pulse of lips, a crenellation of teeth; Isabela groans, tasting salt and whiskey and the shock of breath like a verb, catching it between her lips, swallowing it down. “Listen, about earlier.”

“I’m sorry,” Hawke murmurs against her throat, right over the thunderous pulse. “I didn’t—”

“Don’t worry your pretty arse about it,” says Isabela. “We can forget it.”

“Oh, Captain Isabela,” Hawke whispers, skimming her hands down Isabela’s waist to her hips, leaning closer, closer, grazing her ear with the erratic rhythm of her speech, “what _ever_ could we do here on this big, sturdy, voluminous bed?”

“You’re too nice a girl for this,” she murmurs, bright, teasing syllables, feeling the rubber-band vibrations when Hawke giggle suddenly under her mouth, thinking, absurdly: _I did that_.

The press of Hawke’s lips to her expanding ribs and her bare, beating heart is an underhanded ambush, a traitorous raid; Isabela pulls her down and slots their bodies together like glass tumblers, one of Hawke’s legs pressing tight between her own and her voice caught on the hinge of laughter or maybe sobbing, because it feels so good, and it hurts so much, and in the morning she’ll wake up with Hawke’s whole wooly existence stuck to the roof of her mouth like honey, insidious as pocket lint. Because she’ll look at herself in the mirror tomorrow, this woman self-sufficiency and brutal necessity have made, and she’ll be frightened at the openness of her own face, the way it seems her internal organs are showing through her skin so that everyone can see the things she hoards deep inside, every piece of armor ripped away from her breathing body.

She closes her eyes and shudders against Hawke on the bed, feeling her pulse ripple and expand inside her, uncontainable, the one part of her she could never temper to obedience. A brush of fingers, Hawke’s mouth on the inside of her thigh where there’s a scar in the shape of a serrated kitchen knife; forgiveness enough for anything. Her heart is a child, she thinks, the single incomprehensible piece of her articulated anatomy that maybe ever has been: trembling always with fear, and with want, and with love, love, love.

—

There was a time, improbable in retrospect and really briefer than the blink of an eye in the history of her own brittle life, when Isabela had no idea what the volcanic thunder-crush of a cave-in felt like. That was before she knew Hawke, of course, long before a drunken “bloody _brilliant_ idea, old girl, why haven’t they made you Viscount yet” turned, as it was wont to do, into a rare and extraordinary catastrophe somewhere beneath the moldering depths of Darktown after an apocalyptic misstep involving a Carta gang and a fuse that Hawke’s exalted fingers (and wouldn’t Isabela know) were a fragile fraction of a second too eager to light: swish, flick, _boom_. A hasty exit, stage right. 

So, here’s Isabela: a midsummer sort of woman teetering at the edges of early winter in the barren, desert-dry dark of a collapsed sewer, her hip bumping into Hawke’s hip as they pick their way through the ruins, both of them hopelessly, unremittingly lost, and never quite happier for losing her equilibrium. The whole world seems to have condensed down to their untidy earthquake, both of them laughing like they’d meant for it all along, and Isabela with the spark of another improbable matchflare catching deep in her belly like it’s the first time, like falling into step all over again.

“And here,” she says, giving Hawke a leg-up between the breathless half-gasp of laughter, “here I thought you were trying to keep me in line. Make an honest woman out of me. Get me on the straight and narrow.” Hawke looks like she’s just been put through a meat grinder, clothes torn, limestone dust puffing out with every breath, her hair sticking up north and south, east and west; Isabela, stepping out with her into the flickering lamplights of Lowtown at last, feels her breath catch at the sight of her in the half-moon, a shock of _something_ like a blow to the ribs, like being winded. She has to look away.

“‘Straight’ is so far from being the word for you, my vigorous friend,” says Hawke, gulping down air and looking around for Aveline, who is supposed to be on guard patrol tonight and who is by now so used to the general sense of apocalypse following in their wake that she hardly bats an eye. “Voluptuous. Brilliant. Extraordinary. A rare and incomparable treasure, fire of my unspeakable—bugger and _disaster_ , look at us. I’ve got your _hair_ in my teeth.”

“And my hand on your—haha, oof,” she grinds out, having been shoved bodily into the nearest stucco wall, Hawke’s hands pressing fiercely into her arm and her waist. “My. Keen tonight, aren’t we.”

“I need my exercise. Besides, you know what life-threatening near-misses tend to do to a girl,” says Hawke. Isabela pushes, and feels Hawke push back; she holds her spine rigid against the wall, just the barest edge of resistance until Hawke slips her hand down Isabela’s hip to her thigh, and she gives: they press into each other with a starved eagerness, as if they haven’t had their fill of each other with the years, as if they never will. There’s a surprising sweetness to the way they kiss, she thinks dimly, summer-lazy, peach-warm, unhurried; it’s strange even now, to not have to rush this, to not want to. To have no last words stacked like thunder on her tongue. To have everything she can reach out and hold, if she’ll only take it.

Her memory dwells still on last year, on the Fuckup, the one the whole of Kirkwall still quakes with deep in the guts of its brick and mortar: she relives it sometimes, on the deepest and darkest of nights, when she's feeling especially wobbly in some great overstuffed emotional brain-pocket and spends an evening gorging herself on might-have-beens, wondering what she might have done differently, how and who she would be if she’d never run at all. But fantasy is fantasy, and nothing’s ever going to change what’s brought her here to this back alley with her fingers tugging Hawke’s coalstone hair back until she shows her neck, only ever for Isabela; nothing’s ever going to uncouple the chain-links that have kept her feet afloat on the cobblestone of Kirkwall, where the barroom floorboards and the wide mouth of the sea keep a rhythm better than anything ever has or will.

It’s a strange thing, this sense of coming back to herself. Her heart sinks, strangely, before it rises again, and she only has a brief window of panic to wonder if it’s a heart attack before she recognizes it as the sensation that comes from realizing that your heart isn’t anchored down in your chest where you thought it’d be; that gravity has caught you here, too, deep inside, where nothing should be able to reach.

“You know what we ought to do, Hawke?” she asks. Their shadows twine together against the cobblestones, darkness into darkness, like moss grown over old roots.

“What?”

“Have a bit of girly _fun_.”

Hawke kisses her again against the lower lip, near to breathless. Isabela tastes salt, tastes something burnt and winter-wild. “I thought that was what we’re doing, y’know,” she says, and squeezes Isabela’s arse—for measure, Isabela supposes, and laughs anyway.

“I mean _private_ fun. In-my-room fun. The sort of fun,” she murmurs, leaning in until her lips only just brush against Hawke’s ear, “that involves me in the bath with a truly _insane_ amount of those bubbles—the ones we stole from the de Montforts, remember—and a bottle of my cheapest and rosiest.” Hawke’s mouth won’t quite close, she notices with a slow jolt, bitten-red and thrilled in the jagged contours of her face. “So. Fold that away in your one-track mind and do with it what you will, Hawke, it’s hard telling where the winds will point my incomparable bosom in the next five minutes.”

She shifts away from the wall and from Hawke, her heart in her mouth and entirely out of time with the footsteps that follow, both of them jerking around each other in the wrong time signature until Isabela flings her hand out and feels Hawke catch it, linking their fingers in an arc. A nightbird calls from the foundry roof as they stagger, together, into the lamplight, almost blinding after the back alley of thirty seconds ago, the whole world brilliant and amazed in suspended midnight; it’s the sort of thing, Isabela supposes, that lets you know you’re alive—that tiny flicker of light, the spark cradled between both your hands. And all the way to The Hanged Man, all the way through Lowtown’s glowering streets, she never lets go of Hawke’s hand in the dark.

—

When the daffodils come up with the grass and the grey thunderstorms in the spring Isabela pulls up short just outside of the Hightown market to look at them, pressing the velvet of their yellow petals to her nose like benediction, as if she’s never seen them before. It’s a strange comfort, she thinks, that no matter what else—no matter the harshness of Kirkwall or the rest of the world, there will always be daffodils.

Hawke teases her for it once, mouthing at her jawline, her fingers curling at Isabela’s waist. “Going soft under my watch, old girl,” she says, summer-sweet. “I can’t even remember the last time I had to bail you out of something.”

“I could go steal a necklace or something. Undermine the City Guard. For old times, and my reputation, and all.”

“Mm. As arousing as that sounds—no,” says Hawke, pressing closer to her on the bench and looking, absurdly, almost shy. “It was never about—you know. Keeping you out of trouble.”

Isabela twines their fingers together and says, with certainty, “I know.”

She’ll wonder, later, at the clamor of the stars and the flowers in the milk jug on her wobbly table and she'll think they seem strangely brighter, that the air seems a bit warmer than it did earlier; she’ll look at them, and she’ll look at her feet tangled with Hawke’s feet under the thin blanket, and she’ll never be able to decide whether it’s because of Hawke, or because of herself, or because of them both, together.

—

At the very beginning, swallowing down her shock: Isabela, fourteen years old with dirty stockings and ancient bones and not ten minutes out of her own funeral, had asked the sailor sitting beside her, _How is that even possible, to let yourself love anyone at all?_

The sailor, her voice sweet like winterlight and hours passing by, had told her: _Love is transformative, and sudden, and completely, unrepentantly absurd. But if you don’t do anything about it, the whole thing turns to vinegar. Don’t let it sit. Don’t let it go to dregs._

Just like that: as certain as a god, like it was something tangible, absolute.

 _But how am I supposed to love anyone_ , Isabela had thought, so many, many years later, _when people are so unreliable, so unpredictable? When I'm so lost to myself?_

—

A woman is a scientist, she’d said once, a clever pathfinder learning to navigate the treacherous waters of world and of herself, and it was through that line of thought—here, she pauses to congratulate herself on both the metaphor and the extremely favorable outcome—that she and Hawke first conducted their Experiment in the dusty confines of Isabela’s rented room, the thing that turned their bones to jelly, the thing that made the floorboards creak and got a tiny splinter in Isabela’s heart, and they were supposed to give themselves full marks and a bottle of wine for such a successful endeavor, and move on with their lives the way functioning adults are meant to do. Of course, that was before they fucked up and did it all again, but the sentiment counts for something in the end, if only because it made her feel so clever.

The thing is, there’s no such thing as a functioning adult, and there’s no accounting for the way other people are inevitably going to reach out and snag at your clothes and get their thorns stuck, forever, under your skin. Isabela breaks her own rules: they do it again and again and again, burying themselves in the hush of the years, and before long, Hawke’s keeping spare clothes in her wardrobe, Isabela always sets out two cups for morning tea and starts hanging around Lowtown and then Hightown under the guise of relaying a filthy joke or a questionable job but really just wanting to talk, just wanting to see her smile. She trains herself to sleep on the left side of the bed. They do the washing-up together; they kiss in back-alleys, in the threshold of Isabela’s doorway. They wake up in the same bed, hungover and half-dressed. Their fingers clasp together at Hawke's hip and then slide into a deep tangle like a kiss; if she was ever going to be in love with anyone, she thinks, it would be Hawke.

And the other thing is—the thing you never realize about love until you've been going to bed with it and waking up with it stuck to the roof of your mouth every morning, boiled with your tealeaves and caked under your fingernails—it's that as soon as you let yourself think it, as soon as you say it, you already _are_. Sometimes, the difference between one thing and another thing is a small as the finger-lengths between her hand and Hawke's hand; sometimes, what you've wanted the most—what you've been so afraid of—was a ghost hiding in your shadow all along, buried in the marrow of your bones, waiting, waiting to be found.

She leans down into Hawke and kisses her where she's got her head in Isabela's lap, sleepy-soft, pressing her hands into the strange tangled shapes gravity has made of them, all elbows and impossible angles. Over the docks, the sun is sinking wine-dark beneath the fluid curve of the earth; the nightbirds have already come out, singing their early evening sorrows, beautiful beyond solace. When she pulls back, Hawke smiles at her like she knows every secret Isabela's got, like she wants to say _You don't have to be afraid, anymore_.

And for the first time in her life since her cracked, ancient heart expanded and breathed here in the brick and mortar of Kirkwall, she isn't.

“You know, Hawke,” she says, watching a sailboat sway with the last breath of the sun, “if we died right now, I mean, if the whole of Kirkwall just bloody swallowed us up, I’d be pretty happy.”

“You’re the creepiest person I know.”

“No, you twat, I mean—if this was all we got, like. Here, right now.” She sweeps her other hand across the vast sand, the boundless sea. “I’d be all right with that. Happy, even.”

Hawke tugs her hand closer, and squeezes once, and then lets go. Isabela can hear her swallow, and feels her own mouth go dry. “Got something you want to tell me?” she murmurs, her voice gone tight around the edges.

It's strangely easy to say, for all that, for all the years spent choked with fear and doubt and four-letter words she tried so hard to crush between her molars. “I mean, love you,” says Isabela. She jumped naked into the Waking Sea last winter; it's the same sort of principle, really. “And—and, I guess I always did.” A pause; the thunder of a heartbeat, Hawke's or her own or maybe both. "I always did."

There's a noise from both of them, something that's not quite a laugh and not quite a sob, and Hawke sits up, saying Isabela's name like it means something beautiful, and then closes her eyes. “Do you know what you mean, when you say that?” Hawke asks. When she opens her eyes again, they're brighter than Isabela ever thought a living thing could be; she feels the nighttime hush shiver in her hair, gently, gently.

If she had any sort of concrete answer to that, Isabela would probably say, in a voice a bit less certain than her sailor all those years ago, that it’s about fluidity. That it's about leaving and coming back and knowing and not knowing. That it’s about the change, and the mistakes, the best and the worst alike; that it’s about flowing from one thing to another, endlessly, endlessly. It's loving Hawke in all the spaces they've carved out for themselves, the things that are theirs and theirs alone; it's falling off the end of the world together, it's growing in the cracks between everything, it's the spark of becoming. It's the tireless strength of Hawke’s fingers tangled with her fingers—the solidity of themselves, together and apart, and all the things they can make between them.

It is, above all, the press of her lips to Hawke's: the first touch of understanding, as easy as breathing, as concrete and unmistakable as the warm places where their bodies are touching.


End file.
